Joseph Vogl discusses Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the semiotics of speculative finance markets in the introduction to his brilliant interdisciplinary book.

Popularly known as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes won that title ostensibly by rejecting traditional modes of intellectual inquiry largely associated with commentary on prior texts, and replacing them with the first attempt at a kind of radical phenomenology.

So Twitter can hide some tweets, and does, and will continue to do so, now with a toothpick precision to tailor its approach according to the law of the land (or landline) where the 140 character chirp has been posted. And everyone is up in arms and ready to boycott the addictive site for… a day.

Most of what passes for cool ontology these days—when people dare to do it at all—is just a form of atomism. How do I mean? An atom is something that can't be cut any further. We think of them as little shiny pingpong balls like the ones we saw in high school chemistry. 

I did a talk on what I call hyperobjects at CalArts at the beginning of this month. Next week I'm in New Orleans at Loyola University doing the 2.0 version. 1.0 was about plutonium. This one will be about oil.

Tomorrow I leave for RMMLA, which should be a blast. My new friend philosopher Peter Gratton will be there. I'm going to do a panel with object-oriented philosophers Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant. Ian and Levi have books that are imminent and marvelously complementary, both on OOO.

I've recenly had a lot of success workshopping an essay by blogging about it. It's on Buddhism and object-oriented ontology and you can find the most recent post here.

Hello everybody. Since this is my first post I thought I'd just tell you my big news. 

The notion that philosophers have their heads in the clouds is one of the oldest in the book. Make that a specific book; as Alexander George points out in a recent contribution to The Stone, Aristophanes used it to ridicule Socrates in The Clouds.

A key issue in the debate around atheism concerns what happens at a cognitive level when we say we believe something.